by Lon K. Montag ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 23, 2014
A thriller that melds Mickey Spillane with Mr. Chips, with predictably chaotic results.
A young man reluctantly takes over his father’s mission against the embodiment of chaos.
If it’s possible to create a genre called “pulp philosophy,” Montag (The Dichotomy, 2015, etc.) has done it. The plot of the author’s latest novel hews to the conventions of pulp fiction, with tough-guy dialogue; bruising, exquisitely detailed fights; world-weary men beaten down by fate; and world-weary women worn down by loving them. The dialogue and interior narration, however, also revolve around the inner workings of a philosophy department at an upstate New York university and the quandary of philosophy in the face of pure chaos. This chaos is embodied in a sinister character known only as the “old man” and his sidekick, O’Grady. Alec McDougal is the son of Alexander McDougal, a philosophy professor at Durcheinander (“chaos” in German) University. There, the “old man” once made an academic conference go horribly wrong, and more than 50 people died. Alec fled to Northern California, but inevitably, he inherits his father’s failed war on the old man and all he represents. The basic plot is fairly simple, but it’s fragmented and refracted through the twin journals of Alec and Alex, each full of surreal visions and dialogue such as, “Steinberg isn’t bringing trouble with him....He’s going to lay bare for all to see the darkness in each of our hearts.” Yet the novel doesn’t reveal the facts of what exactly happened at the doomed conference until 25 pages from the end; up to then, it’s mostly nervous allusions and missing journal pages. It also doesn’t provide clear context for Alec’s initial apocalyptic vision or its connection with any other events—is it a vision of the original conference or a prophecy of a conference yet to come? The very idea of a philosophy lecture devolving into mass slaughter is more than a little absurd, but readers are apparently expected to read it straight and to valorize the men who do the hard, lonely work of thinking about chaos. However, the very text in which this occurs is itself riddled with chaos.
A thriller that melds Mickey Spillane with Mr. Chips, with predictably chaotic results.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615950303
Page Count: 240
Publisher: RGS Press
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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